by Rob Pegoraro, Special for USA TODAY

by Rob Pegoraro, Special for USA TODAY

Question: The computer keeps shutting down on me when I leave it alone for a minute. How do I fix that?

Answer. This question came from a relative I recently visited, which allowed me to see the problem firsthand - and re-learn two useful lessons.

One is that in computing, we don't all speak the same language. The laptop in question wasn't shutting down, but it was locking the screen and displaying the login-and-password prompt that you would get at the end of each startup sequence.

If you're laughing at the silly person who doesn't know the difference between bootup, wakeup and shutdown - please stop. Everyday users employ non-approved vocabulary for computing all the time, and effective tech support has to take account of that and figure out what people actually have in mind--being my extended family's primary source of computing help has pounded that lesson home.

(The computer industry can complain about this once it stops serving up such linguistic clunkers as, say, the use of "SSID" instead of "network name" in WiFi interfaces.)

With the problem identified, fixing it involved a few more details. Windows 7's Control Panel doesn't include this setting under its "User Accounts and Family Safety" heading--even though that's where you set passwords. The "System and Security" category didn't pan out either.

But a search for "security" yielded links for "Lock the computer when I leave it alone for a period of time" and "Set screen saver password" in the Control Panel's "Personalization" area. (You can also get to this dialog by right-clicking the desktop and choosing "Personalize...") Both opened a small window with a checkbox next to "On resume, display login screen," with the wait time set to only one minute and the screen saver set to "(None)."

Clicking that checkbox to clear it solved the problem. That left the computer unguarded, but this laptop doesn't leave this user's desk anyway--so if a stranger is in a position to get at the computer, this guy has bigger problems.

What if you want to require a password when the computer wakes, but not when it shuts off the screen and starts up any screen saver? You have to look elsewhere: Win 7's Power Options control panel includes an option to demand a password on each wakeup.

The same directions apply in Windows 8, although the new-look PC Settings control panel (not the same as the traditional control panel) offers the ability, under its Users heading, to skip the password routine when the computer wakes.

Microsoft ought to revisit this screen-saver-centric interface to computer security. As screen savers become increasingly irrelevant--you don't need to run one to keep images from burning into a flat-panel screen, because LCDs don't suffer from that the way cathode-ray-tube monitors do--the chances of users being confused by Microsoft's design only increase.

(Apple has lost some of its good habits about interface consistency, but it's kept this choice clear in OS X Mountain Lion: Open System Preferences, click Security and choose how long the Mac should wait before requiring a password after either the screen dims or the computer sleeps.)

Tip: Don't waste your time with "registry cleaners" for your PC

Another problem I saw on this computer was leftover traces of an app that had promised a faster PC by cleaning up the Windows Registry, the database of settings used to coordinate how programs interact with the system and each other.

Getting rid of this utility's leftovers to stop it from flashing an error message at each bootup ate about an hour of my time, ending with me booting the laptop into "Safe Mode" by holding down the F8 key and then deleting the offending files manually. The user said he had never seen any performance improvement from it--so this alleged speedup had actually cost at least an hour of useful computing time.

But it could have been worse: Registry editors and cleaners can cause problems with software you do want if used carelessly. Piriform's free CCleaner might help tidy up an older system and may yield a marginal performance boost, but that's as far as I've ever been tempted to go into the Registry.

If you really want to keep your Windows PC in optimal shape, I've got much cheaper and easier advice: Be picky about the software you add to it.